Fall TV Season: Charlie's Angels Looks. . .Bad

The original and true Charlie's Angels

I'm a big fan of cheesy 70s TV shows, especially the ABC "jiggle" era, since it was the beginning of my pop-culture awareness. I was 10 in 1976, which is about the time I started buying 45 records, and cluing in to Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, ABBA, and Charlie's Angels. There is something special about the era, and the products of that era that can't be recaptured for people who weren't there (though the brilliant-but-cancelled Swingtown came close).

Charlie's Angels, the original TV show, wasn't by today's standards a great show. There was a looseness and a languidness about 70s TV dramas. Today's dramas probably have two to three times as much script as they had in those days. And you can't say the acting was terrific (though Kate Jackson was a pro), but it was serviceable, and better than it had any right to be. What the original Charlie's Angels had was an intangible but obivous magic. It captured lightning in a bottle, with a cast that clicked spectacularly, and an energy that is undeniable. When Farrah Fawcett left the show (after one short season) in a tragic contract dispute, they captured the lightning again, amazingly enough, with the casting of Cheryl Ladd as Fawcett's character's sister. It should have failed. The writers didn't even try to be clever with that one, but Ladd fit right in as if nothing ever happened.  Jackson still crackled with her "smart one" routine, and Jacklyn Smith's "streetwise" character got fleshed out more. It was all going great.

The later, fake Charlie's Angels

But when Jackson left, the show became a shadow of its former self. Neither Shelley Hack nor Tanya Roberts clicked at all, and the show sputtered out after five years. After that, there were abortive attempts at a TV reboot, and then two feature films featuring Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz. The movies were successful commercially, but not critically. That in itself isn't any different from the TV show, which never got critical respect.  But the movies had little to do with the series beyond the setup, and an attempt at continuity with the original (Smith appeared in part two). I never really understood how there could be three Bosleys (David Doyle, Bill Murray and  Bernie Mac) in that continuity, but whatever.

The biggest problem was, the movie Charlie's Angels made the girls into superheroes, sort of a trio of kick ass James Bonds. In fact, the movies seemed to be a blend of 007 and The Matrix. The 70s series was just a group of very pretty women who used to be cops, who were now private investigators. They weren't gifted karate pros, or supernaturally spritely waif-fu experts. I'd hoped, when I heard that the show was being rebooted, that they'd take it back to its roots, but spruce it up with modern storytelling. Looks like they went the movie route. Pity. It looks like it's going to suck. It looks like it will follow Bionic Woman, Knight Rider and V into the remake abyss.